April 2010

04/30/2010

A good way to practice sketching and developing your observation drawing skills is to grab a sandwich, your sketchbook and get in an hour of drawing during lunch. Sketching in a city can be very enjoyable as you’ll most likely draw architectural subjects rather than landscapes. The urban environment is filled with interesting subjects at street level - outdoor seating at restaurants, shoppers or people gathering in parks to eat lunch. Pick a spot and start drawing. Don’t forget to look up! There are lots of fabulous architectural details on buildings that are waiting for a trained eye to find and record on paper. Most of all - have fun and make sketching part of your weekly routine now that summer weather is around the corner.

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These two sketches are ones that I made of Denver's historic Union station during a lunch hour. Each is only 5"x6" drawn with a Staedtler Lumocolor pen on bond paper.

04/27/2010

Have you ever been bogged down locating and inserting 2D people into a Google SketchUp model? If you don’t have well organized component files (I’m the worst...) and are spending way too much time finding people on 3D Warehouse, then I have an easy solution for you - create your own “Master 2D People Model”. I simply created a new model, drew several lines on the ground plane then sorted through dozens of older SketchUp models, copying every 2D person I could find and pasting the component into my master model. The resulting chorus line of human components is now an easy source for populating new models. I can open my Master 2D People Model and quickly copy and paste folks from one model the the other. It’s that easy.

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Here is a basic SketchUp model without any people.

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Here is the same view populated with 25-30 people selected from my Master 2D People Model.

04/24/2010

I volunteered these last two days serving as a “digital visualist” at the 2010 International School Safety Convention in Denver. My role was to capture in quickly drawn sketches the ideas and concepts generated during the numerous presentations by experts in the field of school safety design. I had never attempted this before and not only was I at bit nervous about visually scribing “on the fly” but using the digital technology of the Promethean Interactive Whiteboard! The digital system involving a wireless digital pen to draw on a 5’x6’ touch sensitive screen driven by Promethean Activinspire software took very little time to learn how to use. Within the first hour of the program I was filling electronic pages with multi-colored digital drawings and notes. What a great time!

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I'm drawing directly onto the Promethean board using a digital pen, selecting different colors and line widths picked from the tool palette on the right side of the screen. (this is much like using Photoshop). I used a light gray background to combine the black linework with colored highlights. I placed colors in a different layer beneath the linework and also adjusted the color transparency with a simple and quick move.

What I learned: 1) this involves “drawing from imagination” using an electronic tablet, merging traditional drawing with digital imaging - or what I call “tradigital drawing”, 2) drawing 100% with digital equipment has a very short learning curve, 3) all images are stored in your laptop and easily exported in jpeg formats for documents, 4) visual scribing requires combined listening skills with visualization skills - which isn’t easy, 5) digital drawing allows you to quickly resize and reposition any drawing with a simple select/shrink/drag and drop motion, and 6) it is fun to do!

I may be joining the folks with Promethean in June at the 2010 Miami AIA National Convention teaching architects digital drawing techniques during the host chapter party. Can you imagine what architects will visualize after a few drinks.......?

04/20/2010

Collaboration - to work jointly with others or together esp. in an intellectual endeavor. This is my operative word for 2010. Well, its not a new idea for me. I’ve been collaborating with others all of my life and have recently uncovered documentation that reveals the efforts of a few eleven year old 6th graders! Bowers Elementary School, 1962 - David Hicock, my identical twin John and I teamed up to paint the four seasons onto four 4’x8’ panels mounted in a school corridor.

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I revisited Bowers twenty-five years later and the aging (and a slightly battered) murals were still there! It was a glorious accomplishment worthy of recognition in the American Museum of 6th grade Folk Art.

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With confidence and momentum on our side (I'm the one on the right of each photo), we set our sights on more ambitious public projects: the Manchester, Connecticut Annual Halloween Window Painting Contest! We sized up the front window of G.S.Keith Real Estate Agency and proceeded to win with our Frankenstein/werewolf laboratory. (I especially like the cast shadow from the moon on the floor). The entourage included test tubes, butcher knife, owl, skull, beakers and other scary icons.

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The following year's contest switched from painting on glass storefronts to painting on paper and our collaborative efforts paid off again, winning with the “trick or treat” painting illuminating a ghoulish cast of characters. What imaginations!

04/16/2010

Every now and then it is important to leave the digital camera behind and grab your sketchbook. Drawing from observation in an amazing setting gives you the opportunity to slow down and really SEE where you are. I’m often guilty of the opposite - spinning through a place shooting digital photos and never quite absorbing the full beauty of the scene. My wife Janice (a talented collage artist) and I had the pleasure of spending six days on the mountainous Amalfi Coast splitting our time between the coastal towns of Positano and Amalfi. I sketched every day and really got my eyes and drawing hand into a steady pace filling my 6”x9” sketchbook with pencil drawings. On a side note, I went swimming one day in the ocean and discovered I was at the Positano topless beach. Not the luckiest find - it must have been seniors day because all the woman were over the age of 70. No need to go into the details.....